LiveFire from ngmoco: the Quake 3 engine lives on the iPhone

LiveFire at ngmoco makes a splash at GDC 2009. The game runs on a modified …

"The two most important things in a FPS title are framerate and control—if you don't have those, you're going to be fu**ed," Neil Young tells me. He's playing LiveFire in front of me, the first-person title that gave the company so much buzz at Apple's SDK event. It's just as impressive in person, with a great framerate and controls that look solid... although no one will let me actually play. "We'll get this running faster," Young says, unsatisfied with even this impressive demonstration.

Young, the CEO of ngmoco, is an intense, gray-haired man who is very, very passionate about mobile gaming. A reader sent in a question for him: will there be support for user-made maps? "It's not anything we've talked about seriously," he replies, although the possibility is there. "Here's a question for your readers: would people be interested in being part of a beta test?"

Would Apple allow a publisher to release a beta test on the app store? Young looks up for a moment. "There are a few ways you could do it. You could release a version and then take it off the app store when you have as many people as you want for your test." That way you can have people trying the online play and giving feedback, before the full, for-pay version hits. Young tells a story about playing online via 3G while driving. It almost caused a wreck, but it worked beautifully. "There will also be voice over IP; we didn't show that at the Apple event," he says.

"It took a little while, we have some phenomenal engineers on our team," Young tells me when I ask how long it took to get such a smooth experience on the iPhone. "This is actually the Quake 3 engine. We completely rewrote the renderer, and we completely rewrote the control system and the animation system. We started from that baseline and then we've went from there." Let that sink in: the Quake 3 engine is running—very well—on the iPhone.

The controls mimic dual-analog sticks from consoles, with your thumb on the left side controlling forward and backward motions, as well as strafing, and your right thumb controlling aiming. "I think this does a really good job of showing what you can do," Young says after telling me they're shooting for a release to coincide with the 3.0 firmware.

This shows just how powerful the iPhone can be as a gaming platform: online play with multiple players, talk of a beta test, the Quake 3 engine, the possibility of user-created maps. It doesn't look or feel like a casual game, something that seems to suit Young very well.

Update: Ars was contacted by ngmoco to stress that the maximum number of players online has not been finalized.

Yeah, I saw that too. It could be a counterstrike-style thing where you buy your loadout with virtual money, but it looks more like they want to nickel and dime you for upgrades. Given the disdain most people around here have for that kind of stuff, I'm suprised ars is so gushing about the game.

I would have to disagree with that, as I'd consider Raster Production's Q3A port to the Dreamcast to be excellent (probably better), and the iPhone should be able to handle Q3A just fine considering the hardware it was able to run on.

The technonology is kind of exciting, but the title looks to be very derivative, like most ngmoco titles, including that creepy Nintendogs clone the showed at the same event. You can really see that Neil Young is coming from EA.